Future Directions Proposed For Mozilla 572
Ars-Fartsica writes "MozillaZine is now featuring a set of slides regarding future directions for Mozilla that were detailed at the recent Mozilla developers meeting. SVG and integration with programming languages are among the directions discussed."
Direct link (Score:5, Informative)
Type n, right-arrow, down-arrow, or space to advance a slide. Type p, left-arrow, or up-arrow to go back one slide. Type t to go the the first (title) slide.
Instructions taken from here [mozilla.org]
Re:Direct link (Score:5, Insightful)
Gotta love that "degrade gracefully" concept.
Re:Direct link (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Direct link (Score:5, Interesting)
Well it's a damn shame they broke it for other browsers.
They didn't use the <link rel="next"> meta-tag. Which means, for instance, Opera can't use its default "fast-forward" shortcuts to automagically go to the next page when I hit left-down+right-click.
Re:Direct link (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Direct link (Score:5, Informative)
They are using mozpoint [mozdev.org], which tries to be "a presentation library (of CSS and JS) that can be used to make simple but elegant presentations using the browser as a platform for rendering presentation content". (while on the website it is claimed that the presentations should "work in that other browser too", it might still have some problems, according to the comments here) I hadn't heard about it yet, but it doesn't seem such a bad idea. Might lead to another nice Mozilla application to complement Firefox, Thunderbird, Calendar etc...
So: they wanted to do a slideshow presentation on a Mozilla Developer Day, and they chose to use/support mozpoint. Nice, no?
MS (Score:4, Funny)
Of course, by standards compliant, I mean the standards that Microsoft sets for the web.
Re:MS (Score:3, Funny)
Re:MS (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you mean the standards that were set by the PC implementation of IE or by its mac implementation? These are vastly different, you know? No, I suppose you don't.
Re:MS (Score:5, Insightful)
But don't go blaming Firefox for crashing your machine.
Re:MS (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:MS (Score:5, Informative)
I suggest you try some different RAM chips and try Firefox again.
Although, realistically, Black Screens Of Death should occur randomly, not just when using Firefox.
Also various video card drivers are known to screw up your memory and go down with a Black Screen Of Death
Re:MS (Score:5, Informative)
Roughly once an hour clicking back would simply take my machine (windows XP portable) out. Not even the blue screen of death but a black screen.
I had a simmilar problem with my XP notebook with Firefox. Turns out the problem was a combination of:
Sun's JVM and my ATI video driver (which is a forcefit as Compaq never put out an XP driver for the model laptop I have).
The fix was a laugher... I switched video mode to 24 bit color.
Firebird works fine.
Tabbed Browsing (Score:4, Funny)
Pornography is a major problem on the internet, it is in fact THE major problem, worse than spam, hackers or even Windows!
But what has this to do with Tabbed browsing and Mozilla? Well, I have to admit there was time in my life when I was very low and accidentally found a web page containing a host of pictures of a woman in a state of undress. I believe they are called thumbnail gallery posts. Now, with tabbed browsing, it is possible to easily middle click on all those thumbnails and download the lot, then flick through each picture one handed by just pressing a few keys, so my friends tell me. Luckily, I am stronger than that - I place my faith in the Lord, not my flesh in my shameful hand.
It was at this moment I realised that tabbed browsing made certain activities just TOO EASY, and as such Firefox as a whole was a temptation too far for many surfers. I deleted the History, and sold my computer and after a few months, when I felt safe again, bought a new one. I continue to use only Internet Explorer and have never looked back. With its cumbersome habit of only opening new windows, it is simply impossible to get up a good rhythm and click open the next tiny box on the taskbar at the same time, thank G-d.
Really this post was a call to the Mozilla and Firefox developers- please take this so-called "functionality" out of your product. It degrades woman.
Re:Tabbed Browsing (Score:4, Informative)
It's funny because it's true!
Just a thought... (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe "Integration with operating system" would help.
/. comment 3 years from now (Score:5, Funny)
How about... (Score:3, Interesting)
-a
Maybe they should propose... (Score:4, Funny)
SVG vs Flash (Score:5, Interesting)
What if any SVG based graphic tools are there?
What other benefit besides native browser support will SVG have to use against Flash?
Re:SVG vs Flash (Score:5, Informative)
Re:SVG vs Flash (Score:5, Informative)
Re:SVG vs Flash (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps, but after looking at the 700+ page spec, which, by the way, has dependencies on almost every spec ever issued by the W3C... I kind of doubt it.
To be a bit more specific, SVG encompasses so much that a fully compliant implementation must support not only the massive spec, but also ECMA Script, SMIL, MathML, etc.
What, if any, SVG based graphic tools are there?
The only one I am aware of at the moment is a Corel Product. It costs about 15 grand (USD), or it did the last time I checked.
What other benefit besides native browser support will SVG have to use against Flash?
Complex 2d graphics in non binary form? Honestly, I don't know.
SVG vs Flash-WebDraw and Adobe. (Score:3, Informative)
Check again.
Webdraw [jasc.com]
And a lot of Adobe products support it as well.
BTW Adobe does have a SVG plugin-in that works with mozilla-firefox
Re:SVG vs Flash (Score:4, Informative)
Mozilla already supports Javascript. SMIL isn't needed unless you want to do Flash-like animations. It only needs to render 2D images to satisfy most people.
The only one I am aware of at the moment is a Corel Product. It costs about 15 grand (USD), or it did the last time I checked.
Plenty of people have already mentioned completely free packages such as Sodipodi and Inkscape.
Complex 2d graphics in non binary form? Honestly, I don't know.
I presume you mean rendered into a binary form as opposed to the source being stored in a binary format instead of XML? How can you not? It can be scaled to any resolution, you can zoom in without losing quality, it will be a fraction of the size for many large images (eg architectural drawings or circuit diagrams), etc.
Having the ability to render 2D images in this way is great, as anyone that has used an Acorn and embedded a Draw document in a web page will testify. And we've been able to do that since the mid-90s! Once we are able to embed SVG into web pages then we will also see less need for PDF imho.
Phillip.
Re:SVG vs Flash (Score:5, Informative)
Look, go to Macromedia's page. You have a little menu there in Flash. That's pretty bad design. I'm browsing, I right-click on a text link in the body, I can open it in a new window, a new tab, send the link to my email client, bookmark it, etc. I right-click on a menu item, I get "about flash player". You give the browser control, and that's no longer a problem. You stick to standards and the browser can treat items in your graphic just like HTML items that perform the same function.
If you're using Flash in a way that doesn't seem wrong or clumsy now, then you probably shouldn't replace it with SVG. SVG just lets you use the good parts of vector graphics and animation without feeling guilty about it.
Re:SVG vs Flash (Score:5, Informative)
For people using their browser at non-standard font settings (and they often have a valid reason for that : some sight problems, for instance), your website would be far more consistent with pictures in SVG, which sizes are put in 'ems' instead of pixels.
Just try to resize your fonts (assuming that the website has not fixed-widths fonts ) (ctrl + in Mozilla). Ho! Where are your nice bitmap logos and graphics ? There, in the background, crushed by all the text at worse, overwhelmed by all the text at best.
SVG could just allow the same resize as text. And I guess a lot of people would appreciate that... Whether the implementation would be possible or not, as previously noticed in the thread, is another problem I'm not skilled enough to discuss.
But if it is possible, then sure, let's do it.
Regards,
jdifool
Re:SVG vs Flash (Score:5, Informative)
my point was browser-independant.
But I just explained how Mozilla handled it, which is, indeed, quite bad... :(
Despite the fact that Opera surely zooms images, they remain bitmaps, and thus, they are badly deformed when you go through 2 or 3 zooming.
This is, in my mind, what SVG is really supposed to adress (of course, this is not about pictures or real photographies, just for graphics, buttons, logos and the like...) : non-deformed images.
Regards,
jdif
SVG != Flash (Score:5, Informative)
SVG is lousy at both of the above. I have a friend that looked into the feasibility of SVG as an interface medium, and came back pretty depressed. At one point, I got a bit interested in using SVG for animation, and took a look at the format. I'm reasonably comfortable making the claim that it would be extremely difficult to make an efficient rendering engine for animations using SVG. Furthermore, SVG does not provide functionality for synchronizing audio and phases of an animation (which I believe Flash does).
SVG is good, IMHO, for the following:
1) Tagged diagrams. SVG allows tagging elements with data. This could be a big benefit for CAD and diagram usage.
2) More complex webpage layout. I've never seen it actually done, but it seems that SVG could be used to define arbitrarily-shaped regions in a webpage...up until now, the only regions designers have had to work with, the only thing they could flow text around, was rectangular regions
3) Vector graphics. Plain and simple, it's a standard format for storing vector graphics. This is good for both standalone files and for efficient web-based transmission of graphics.
As for your question about what SVG-based graphic tools are out there -- take a look at sodipodi [sodipodi.com]. It isn't Illustrator (yet), and it isn't going to be for at least a while to come, but it's usable for basic work.
Re:SVG != Flash (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? Are you sure you read about SVG and not about something else? Read the Animation [w3.org] chapter again. Especially, note that you can use SMIL animation [w3.org] mechanisms. Or you can use DOM [w3.org]:
SVG cannot replace Flash today -- mainly, because Flash has widely installed software support and SVG doesn't. However, I believe SVG has huge promises for the future including the uses you listed. IMO, the most important feature of SVG is able to apply the same stylesheet to SVG image/animation that has been applied to a (X)HTML document.
Obviously, Flash has more mature development tools as it has been on the market for longer. Unfortunately for Flash, you practically have to use Macromedia's proprietary tools to create your work. I can see absolutely no reason for SVG not being able to display every content Flash is able to display. I expect to see a converter from Flash to SVG in the future.
As for the performance, I've a bit hard time to believe that you cannot make SVG animations fly when you take a look what latest PC games do. Sure, SVG will require some level of support from hardware but if you try to run your X server without any acceleration, you'll realize that not having any hardware acceleration is too slow for even drawing simple rectangles with high performance, let alone blitting some images.
Re:SVG vs Flash (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:SVG vs Flash (Score:4, Funny)
You forget that MSFT is planning on using SVG as the basis to their next-generation display technology
Yeah, they get me excited, they get my hopes up, so I'm thinking, "Yeah, W3C standard SVG, world-wide confluence as a result of fantastic technical standard!"
And then it'll turn out to be ActiveSVG.NET, "different but better" than W3C SVG....
Re:SVG vs Flash (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft will not be using SVG. They'll be using what their original docs call "WVG". (But after that leak they backpedalled saying "it's really NOTHING to do with SVG, honest"). Now I think they're just calling it part of Avalon.
It provides similar functionality to SVG, it's just different.
Re:SVG vs Flash (Score:5, Insightful)
But to make it a standard on the web, Mozilla has to want it.
It doesn't matter if only a part of it is implemented, html or css isn't 100%ly implemented either, so include SVG in the default build
SVG support is already good enough for most uses.
I can tell users to "download Mozilla version x.y or above", I can't tell them to "download that special SVG-build, but you won't get any localization and everytime you upgrade you will lose SVG".
So the sad state of affairs is that solely because of political reasons SVG in Mozilla is completely worthless and I would advise users to download the Adobe plugin instead.
Konqueror comes with SVG-support out of the box in the default build and it's what I already use for some admin interfaces (where I am the only user) to rotate text (a real shame that you can't do that with HTML. But it's currently the only use I have for SVG and Mozilla could do it if they wanted to.) - because even I am too lazy to mess with specialized builds for Mozilla.
I've tried the SVG-build half a year ago and it was at that time working really well and was technically probably better than Konqueror's current implementation. But because of moronic politics, SVG in Mozilla will continue to rot away completely useless in real life while Konqueror will have lots of SVG users (and bug-reporters) and will improve fast and overtake Mozilla soon.
There were times when Mozilla was really leading development, unfortunately the Mozilla project got obsessed with the idea to dumb everything down and even throw out advanced features (like MNG support!). The future belongs to KHTML and Konqueror, that project has dynamics, the will to improve and is not hindered by politics. Apple has seen that and that's exactly the reason why they chose KHTML over Gecko, IMO.
That all said, I really hope that Mozilla wakes up and proves me wrong. Mozilla is currently the only real cross-platform browser, which is a great advantage over KHTML. Gecko is also a great rendering engine. Include SVG in the default build. NOW.
Re:SVG vs Flash (Score:5, Informative)
The reason SVG isn't included in the default build is nothing to do with "politics" unless you have a very broad definition of the term, it's not in because it's not complete.
Netscape/Mozilla have been burned before when they included half-assed support for a standard. It's bad for a ton of reasons. People don't know what features they can use and what they can't, if mistakes are made they get frozen into the defacto standard and so on. So, until Mozillas SVG support matches a W3C standard, it won't be switched on.
The main problem is that SVG is really huge and complicated. I think last time I checked they were aiming for "SVG Static" which is a cut down version (no animation for instance). Because that's also a recognised standard they could switch it on at that point.
I don't know how Konquerors SVG support matches against Mozillas, but I'd be surprised if they'd implemented the whole thing (with the required KHTML/DOM integration). If they haven't done the whole thing then I'd not suggest they switch it on, it's that simple.
MNG support was dropped because MNG is another huge, (bloated?) spec. It's not just GIF-with-PNG you know. If anything it competes with Flash. The code for it was huge and it the person who owned the relevant module didn't care about it, so it got dropped. Now, whether you agree with this decision or not is somewhat irrelevant, you aren't the maintainer of that part of Mozilla (feel free to fork the beast). You have to question though - if MNG had been 100x simpler it'd probably still be in there today. As it is, nobody uses MNG at all.
Re:SVG vs Flash (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, HTML and CSS support isn't complete either, so I guess you would throw them out of Mozilla, right?
Supporting such huge standards like HTML, CSS or SVG takes decades to really complete. And there isn't really any problem in including a subset of a standard as long as the renderer and infrastructure are stable (and from my experience they were half a year ago.)
So, until Mozillas SVG support matches a W3C standard, it won't be switched on.
If that is the case, then let's kiss SVG-support in Mozilla goodbye forever. It will never reach the needed testers and developers as long as it is hidden in a special build.
I don't know how Konquerors SVG support matches against Mozillas, but I'd be surprised if they'd implemented the whole thing (with the required KHTML/DOM integration). If they haven't done the whole thing then I'd not suggest they switch it on, it's that simple.
Nonsense. Konqueror has all the SVG support I personally need which makes me happy. Why should I not be happy just because of BS-politics?
And again, HTML and CSS aren't fully implemented either. In no browser. Mozilla comes very close for HTML and CSS, but it's still not 100%. So if every browser-maker would be as closed-minded as you, we would still have no web at all because everybody would wait for the one true standard to be fully implemented. Of course without the web there wouldn't be any real incentive to implement that standard anyway.
Re:SVG vs Flash (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you Flash Click to View plugin developer! (Score:4, Informative)
I mean, I'm sure that it would drive Macromedia bonkers, but dammit, the user comes first, and Flash *is* heavily used by ads.
Oh, and if I can throw in another suggestion: Use Privoxy [privoxy.org]. Some folks may have used Junkbuster a while back and noticed that development has slowed down to nothing -- Privoxy is the continuation. And...it's wonderful. I've turned off all image blocking in my browser, because Privoxy does a better job than my manual blocks. It blocks on image sizes and locations, and when it blocks an image, inserts a bit of HTML that lets you click to view the image (an irritation with Junkbuster is that false positives were extremely aggravating). There's an easy-to-use web configuration interface on Privoxy that can be easily accessed whenever anything is blocked. I just love this program. Aside from Google's non-irritating-and-frequently-useful ads, between Firefox's features, Flash Click to View, and Privoxy, I can't remember the last time I had to see an ad.
There's plenty to keep them busy (Score:5, Funny)
There's plenty to keep them busy for the forseeable future. Lemme see, there's :
Fire - fly
Fire - storm
Fire - engine
Fire - hydrant
Fire - alarm (add-on for the calendar module)
Fire - bird (doh! no already had that one)
Fire - at will [slashdot.org]
Fire - in the hole [domain-involving-goats]
Fire - those responsible
Fire - those who did the firing
Fire - ooh oh oh I'll take you to burn [lyricsxp.com]
Come on now, join in everyone ...?
Re:There's plenty to keep them busy (Score:3, Funny)
2. ?????
3. Profit !
... Oh, Dow...Rightsizing is already there
Re:There's plenty to keep them busy (Score:3, Funny)
Smaller Pieces, People (Score:4, Interesting)
FireFox r0x0rz -- it's the best cross-platform browser out there and its standards compliance is quite good.
I haven't tried Thunderbird, but I've heard a lot of good things about it. (Sorry, but an e-mail client is going to have to be at least as good at searching archives as Eudora for me to switch. There's a suggestion for 'em...)
Concentrate on making those two apps the best in their respective market niches. Cut out the dead wood like Composter. Even the new version is still generating ugly code. If someone wants a pseudo-WYSIWYG HTML editor, there are FAR better options out there.
I must say, though, I like what the developers have done in the past year. They seem to be moving more in the direction of smaller, lighter, faster, more-focused apps, and that's A Good Thing(tm). Keep up the good work, guys.
p
Re:Smaller Pieces, People (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing is, nobody using WYSIWYG web-design tools really cares what the output looks like, as long as it's valid HTML that looks OK in most browsers. Anyone doing 'serious' web design is going to use a 'serious' WYSIWYG web design tool, btu the built-in editor in Mozilla (or any browser) isn't meant to be that. It's meant to be
Proposals. (Score:5, Funny)
1. Rename Firefox to Foxfire.
2. Add better support for XHTML and CSS 2.
3. Rename Foxfire to Foxxy Brown.
4. Change the XML parsing engine to support new DTMLs.
5. Rename Foxxy Brown to Thunderbird (#2).
6. Put in a proactive pop-up blocker that DoS attacks websites that have pop ups.
7. Rename Thunderbird (#2) to Internet Explorer Jr.
8. Rename IE Jr. to Underpants.
9. Collect Underpants.
10. ????
11. Profit.
Step 10 is going to be the hardest.
Integration with a programming language (Score:5, Funny)
Pertaining to the Firefox "Technology Preview" (Score:4, Interesting)
First of all, I think this software is great. After 5 years of reluctantly using IE (one reason - speed), I have finally been able to make a comfortable switch.
I have but one small beef: In Mozilla 1.6.x, hitting CTRL+Enter in the address bar caused the typed URL to open in a new tab. In the Phoenix/Fire* series of browsers, this feature has been inexplicably removed. I'm probably just missing some switch in the Preferences that I've been too lazy to toggle, but let's be serious - it's a good, simple feature and 90% of end users probably never open their Preferences except to clear cache after browsing for porn.
(Also, it would be nice if they could settle on a name.)
Re:Pertaining to the Firefox "Technology Preview" (Score:3, Informative)
Netscape use to be fast (Score:4, Interesting)
Netscape (which mozilla is built off) loaded within about 10 seconds on those machines....
Man, I wish I could get the PC version of that, I'm sure it'd load and run quicker than even firefox could hope to do.
(What took 10 seconds on 16mhz would take how long on 1.4ghz again?)
Mozilla..... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mozilla..... (Score:3, Funny)
Mozilla is like Emacs in some ways... (Score:5, Funny)
"We are excited to use Mozilla as our new operating system," exclaimed Steve Ballmer, jumping around like a monkey. "The recent inclusion of web browser functionality in Mozilla makes it the perfect operating system for modern users."
Or, shall we say, Emacs is a great operating system, it just lacks a decent editor.
godamnit! (Score:5, Interesting)
i want a browser that will remember its state between sessions. if i close the 15 windows i've got open, i want them all back again, same site, same position, when i re-open it again!
sheesh. 15 years of web-browsing, and we're still begging for the most rudimentary, fundamental, web-browsing-workflow features to be implemented, while the rest of the 'web scientists' go off into RFC and NIH land
(apologies if there is actually a 'browser' thats capable of maintaining state information between sessions. please inform me if it'll run on OSX
Re:godamnit! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:godamnit! (Score:5, Informative)
saved browser state (Score:5, Informative)
multizilla.mozdev.org [mozdev.org]
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Re:godamnit! (Score:5, Informative)
Any feature you are missing, check the plugins first. Chances are someone's already implemented it.
Re:godamnit! (Score:5, Informative)
More saved state in browsers! (Score:3, Informative)
I'd be interested in a feature I saw suggested once -- a full, eternally (well, unless the user desires to remove it for privacy reasons) persistent tree-like history. The user could go back to any point in time and trace back and forward along browsing sessions.
Work with the Java guys... (Score:5, Informative)
J2EE seems strong at the backend. With a strong frontend, maybe MS has to react for a change.
Do not intergrate! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do not intergrate! (Score:3, Funny)
The day IE blocks popup... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The day IE blocks popup... (Score:3, Interesting)
These are going to be security tools provided by the same people who wrote the operating system that seems so insecure in the first place.
Re:The day IE blocks popup... (Score:4, Interesting)
Once IE includes (intelligent) popup blocking, there will be little, if any, reason for advertisers to try using them and they will disappear from the web entirely.
As it is, outside of pron sites, you don't get too many popups anymore unless you've installed some sort of adware. Adware is the future of invasive advertising; infiltrate the user's TCP/IP stack and work from there, the users owe you the right to advertise to them because you have 1st ammendment rights to be heard.
At last! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is more than a cosmetic issue. Mozilla has the OK and cancel buttons in dialog boxes in the "wrong order" compared to the rest of my desktop, and so I frequently find myself hitting the wrong button by reflex. I also run into bugs in the mozilla widgets all the time. Try middle-clicking on the scroll bar of a textarea widget (under X): its supposed to absolute-reposition the scrollbar; it does that, but in addition pastes the clipboard into the textarea! Another benefit of native widgets would be to decrease memory usage, since the widget libs in memory would be shared.
Its nice they've been listening to their users.
--
Wanna play some word games? [ernet.in]
Mozilla non-native UI (Score:5, Informative)
That may have been a justification, but I think that the real reason for Mozilla to have non-native widgets is that it's a lot of work to maintain all the platform-specific codebases. There are already platform-specific issues, but in general someone can add a feature to Mozilla without knowing how to code for every platform under the sun.
I don't know exactly how this will work with native widgets, unless the Moz folks want to take a least-common-denominator approach.
Plus, I wonder if they can rely on sizes of various widgets. Remember that they're integrating widgets with chunks of their laid-out document, when placing, say, a Submit button on the window. With their own widgets, they know exactly how big everything is.
Another issue might be different code structures. For example, the Macintosh Toolbox uses an event loop. GTK uses callbacks. How does one reconcile differently structured widget APIs?
I believe that Netscape Navigator 4.x tried to do this with native widgets back in the day...but the widgets operated different from regular widgets on my classic Mac.
I agree that native widgets would be wonderful from a user standpoint, but there *are* issues with having an extremely cross-platform program with native widgets on each platform. Remember that the MSIE developers only have to worry about one platform...
ocallahan.org/mozilla/why-no-native-widgets.html (Score:5, Informative)
People frequently ask why Mozilla implements its own widget set rather than just using the widget set available on whatever platform it's running on. This document is an attempt to explain why. Transparency and Z-ordering
Consider this testcase [slashdot.org]. It's a text field behind an element full of "blah" text. The "blah" element is transparent, so you can see and even edit the text field with the "blah" text overlaid on top. This simply can't be done in with Gtk or Qt widgets (unless this has changed in a very recent version of these toolkits). In Win32 it can only be done in Win2000 or WinXP, and then it is tricky and inefficient. If you don't believe this, try implementing the same effect using your favourite platform toolkit, and email me if you succeed.
Getting this right isn't optional. It's a requirement for a correct CSS implementation. Other HTML/CSS functionality
An HTML BUTTON element can contain arbitrary HTML. It's practially impossible to get that to work with any platform button widget. (Note that the HTML inside the button is part of the same document as the button itself.) Printing
On many platforms it's very difficult or impossible to get a native control to print. International languages
When you browse the Web you find content in every language that computers can handle. It is important for the browser to have strong support for uncommon languages. This means it is important for the browser to display form elements containing strange characters and scripts. Many platforms (e.g., older versions of Windows) do not provide good support for locales other than the locale that the operating system itself is installed for. Therefore their widgets aren't good enough for strong browser language support. Performance
On many platforms the per-widget memory and time cost is quite significant. This is OK for most GUI apps because you typically don't have more controls per window than fit on the screen. But in a browser, you sometimes see pages with hundreds or thousands of controls. (Think "a long comments page in Slashdot when you have moderation points".) This has to be fast and not consume too much memory. On some older Windows versions it's simply impossible to create 1000 edit boxes without crashing the system! Event handling
The DOM Events model defines ways for a page to intercept events such as keyboard or mouse input before they are dispatched to the control with focus. It would be very tricky and error-prone to implement this using platform-specific hacks. Arguments For Native Widgets
Here are some arguments for using native widgets, and how we answer them. Native look and feel are critical for usability
Agreed. We have started using platform-specific APIs to render our widgets as if they were native widgets, wherever we can. For GTK, WinXP and MacOSX we actually call theme APIs so that Mozilla picks up whatever theme is currently in force. It really looks like a native app. All of the above advantages are still retained because we're still not using actual native widgets. It also means we automatically "keep up" as the platform look changes, which has been a big problem for "cross platform" UI toolkits in the past.
We're still working on the "native feel" problem. Feel doesn't vary as much as look, it seems, so it's less of a problem, but we have a number of tweaks that vary the feel of our widgets across platform and we'll add more. Native look and feel are critical for accessibilty
We're building in support for platform accessibility APIs in GTK and Win32, so our widgets will be just as accessible as the native widgets. Too much work for developers
Yes, but it's worth it. Too slow, too much footprint
Yes, rolling our own widgets requires some extra code and may not be as well optimized as the platform widgets. But as noted
Have adware, spyware, pop-ups, and evil web pages (Score:5, Interesting)
If not, there is (still) a market for mozilla.
Sometimes I feel like I'm bailing out an ocean, but I'm converting users one at a time. To non-geeks, it's starting to hit home, as to just how bad the crapware is getting. I do a little show and tell. "see this program (points to IE) - BAD!!!", "see this program (points to mozilla) - GOOD!!!". I of course give them a run down (in laymens terms) on how the sneaky stuff gets on their system, and how 99% comes from IE and Outlook Express. After that, all are more then willing to try something different. So on goes Moz!
One thing to remember is that it's very important that you setup Mozilla for them. Make sure the pop-up blocker is enabled. Also set it so that these things are disabled(unchecked):
-move or resize existing windows
-raise or lower windows
-hide status bar
-change status bar text
-change images
Finally. _warn_ _them_ , that Mozilla won't work on every single site. Tell them to fall back to IE on the few sites that don't work(with moz)... But that Mozilla should be first line of defense.
Or not (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, I think there there are few compelling reasons for allowing websites to modify the status bar information. Doing so is a serious security issue. Users (well, they won't think in about this in rigorous terms, but they do so unconsciously) treat the status bar as a source of trusted communication between their browser and them. If remote websites can muck with it, they lose the ability to trust that area.
I suspect that there are more sites that break with popups disabled than with status bar text and rollovers disabled combined...but we still do it. The main reason remote websites have so much control over browsers today is because of a Microsoft-started prescedent of trusting websites, of treating web developers as application developers. They aren't. Every website you visit just plain isn't trusted, and there should be much tougher rules on what websites can do to a browser. Allowing a website to, say, change the appearance of widgets is, IMHO, unacceptable.
Why rollovers are bad (Score:4, Insightful)
* The first is an element [apple.com] in the Apple HIG. While the HIG is not a "textbook to HCI", it has very good, well-developed suggestions, and arguments against guidelines in it should probably be well supported -- Apple was famous for a decade and a half primarily on the strength of the content in the HIG. The Apple HIG states that program state should not change based on the location of the mouse cursor alone -- a mouse button should be pressed to indicate that an action is taking place. The reason? The user always feels that he is in control and can move the mouse around without causing anything to happen. It also means that he does not need to wave the mouse to operate a program. Note that this guideline has been broken before by Apple in the form of Balloon Help. Basically, not changing state is important to allowing the user to feel in control of the computer, and free to move the mouse as he desires.
* The second argument was from a major HCI figure, though I cannot remember whether it was from iarchitects or from something from Jakob Nielson. I rather wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. "If your interface does not immediately make apparent what is clickable and what is not, and you need to insert rollovers to make things clear to the user, you have failed to make an intuitive interface." The idea of *having* a desktop with possible choices to click on available is that all choices are immediately apparent. An interface that requires rollovers requires the user to move the mouse around to determine what is clickable. We have standardized interface elements so that it's easily apparent how things work at a single glance from the user. Falling back to visual identification via rollovers is a big step backwards.
Rollovers became popular starting sometime in the
"multimedia era" when CD-ROMs were coming out, and there was loads of Director-produced custom interfaces being produced by graphic designers. They ignored the standard widgets, and Photoshopped up their own. Unfortunately, it was frequently difficult to figure out when something was even a *control*, and so they had to provide rollovers.
The second major boom came when big images with imagemaps started becoming popular on the Web, and graphic designers started getting paid good wages to produce websites. All of a sudden, a bunch of pages were covered with huge images with knobby things, metallic things, slider things, little ridges, dimples, rectangles, and whatnot. Some chunks of these interfaces were clickable and some were not. They were essentially unusable without rollover highlighting and the user waving his mouse around each page to figure out what was a control.
* I have a third and final argument, which comes simply from me, though I'm sure it's not original. I find animation to be something that should be strictly reserved for important attention-getting. Short of making noises (which is disruptive in, say, an office environment), there are few other good ways to attract the user's attention without grabbing control of the environment and slapping a dialog up in front of everything else (something to be avoided if at all possible). There have been few sanctioned uses of animation in Apple's history (again, I use Apple as an example because Apple traditionally had very good UI work). One of these is the "barber pole", or equivalent of the progress bar for tasks with an unknown completion time. I believe that the only other animated elements are menubar flashing (to visually indicate a beep), application menu flashing (to indicate an error status), and ZoomRect()-style animation to indicate the source of an item being opened. Except for the barber pole and the application menu flashing (which indicates a fairly serious condition), all are directly triggered as a result of user input and are quickly over over. This reserves animation
What Mozilla should concentrate on. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're going to compete with IE, javascript is the way to go. Start with matching the functionality (IE the ability to reference objects without needing to go through getelementByID the way you can in the MS browser, this will eliminate 90% of the javascript incompatibilities between the two browsers).
3] Realize that as far as the end user is concerned browser rendering technology is done and will be done until there's enough bandwidth for full motion picture browsers (Think tivo on steroids). Adding more features just adds to bloat for very, very minimal gain. To that end the focus should hinge on a better, more intuitive interface -- the more you can make it disappear while still providing easy access to navigation and google the better. And don't forget the art, IE still makes pages look better that definately needs to be fixed.
4] Firefox and Thunderbird are killer apps but Thunderbird especially has a lot of room for improvement. When Thunderbird can piece together split usenet files and handle Y-ENC then it will probably truly have arrived for many usenet junkies. After that you need to out exchange exchange and realize email is a centeral pda application and to that end we need scheduling, address books that sync with our newtons, and help us manage our lives. Indeed, do Thunderbird right and you can really shake up the world because there's a real hunger and need for an ultra powerful email/usenet/scheduler/contact/pda manager.
Re:What Mozilla should concentrate on. (Score:5, Insightful)
> ability to reference objects without needing to > go through getelementByID the way you can in the > MS browser, this will eliminate 90% of the
> javascript incompatibilities between the two
> browsers).
NonoNONOnonoNONONO. And again NO. This is just so seriously wrong I don't even know where to begin.
1. You seriously want the global namespace polluted to that extent? I sure as hell don't!
2. Even MSDN tells you NOT to use direct access. As they themselves will tell you, it's bad programming practice and a tremendous performance hit as well.
(Remind me never to use any API you've had a hand in developing, ok? Thanks!)
Besides, MSIE supports a good chunk of W3C DOM (as do Opera, Konq, Safari, et al.) -- getElementById() and getElementsByTagName() are *already* cross-browser, so there is absolutely no reason not to use them.
There is absolutely zero reason for any other browser to support MSIE's b0rken object model.
Work with Apple? (Score:3, Interesting)
Positive Thinking - Standards just aren't enough (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm seeing a lot of comments in reply to this article advocating that the mozilla foundation stick to making web browsers, a task that it now admittedly does very well. Follow the Unix philosophy, small programs that do one thing and do it well.
I agree with the philosophy, and agree with what the foundation has done in starting the firefox/thunderbird fork.
But I feel the issue isn't as simple as some fellow /.ers are saying it is, and the longterm prospects are definitely interesting. The key topics mentioned in this slideshow (SVG, XUL, XBL, Eclipse plugin, scripting language integration) are all focussed around the central issue of what the words 'web application' are going to mean in the future.
Think back to several years ago in the dark ages of IE4.0 sheer dominance, when you were hard pressed to find an online banking service that would permit your alternate browser inside without you having to spoof a UA string. Microsoft had defined the standards that the web developers had been using, and we suffered for having a just standards compliant browser set.
We are now at a lull in the web application development market, at least from the client side. Sure on the server side the battle wages ever on, but the front end is pretty sown up. But it won't remain that way. Nothing like that does in this industry.
This is a proposal to start heading the mozilla project in the direction of a web development framework. Extending the front end possibilities, and giving developers the tools to close the gaps between web applications and thin client applications.
Microsoft is heading in this direction. Rumours are that the next major IE that will ship with longhorn will have a framework similar to this idea, with complete integration between the HTML forms and the windows.form components Microsoft is working on. If we stay statically focussed on supporting just the W3C standards, which don't extend to something as encompassing as an application framework, then Microsoft will be allowed to take the iniative again.
At best, this is an attempt to refocus upon what XUL was originally a vision of, just done right this time. At worst, its an attempt to think long term and make sure we aren't taken by surprise when Longhorn ships with a new beast of an IE. We need a framework like this, and I see noone in the opensource world in a better position to do this than the mozilla project.
Does Mozilla need to do this, or can we be sneaky? (Score:5, Insightful)
Something like this is ultimately a gamble which may or may not pay off...and if it doesn't work, there's a huge amount of cruft dumped in the codebase?
I'd rather see something like the approach Apple used with KHTML in making Safari. If someone wants to make a program called, say, "Mozilla Platform" that *uses* Mozilla, I think that'd be a lot safer than trying to make one massive integrated push.
I think that trying to integrate everything has been the largest problem facing the Mozilla project. I have, many times, contributed patches to open source projects. I have never contributed to Mozilla, because the project was (at least to me) very large and overwhelming...and I only really cared about fixing problems that affected me. If I ran into a problem, it was often something that would require learning a huge amount about how Mozilla is structured to fix. I'm okay spending a day or two fixing a minor problem on a project that's irritating me. I'm not willing to spend a week doing so.
The "integrated" approach is a turn off from a resource standpoint. It made the Mozilla suite large from a disk and memory usage standpoint.
It meant that releases had to be spaced widely apart, and that one broken component could hold up releases of the rest of the package.
It meant that you had to lug around a mail client, web page design program, etc that you might really not be interested in.
In general, I think that Open Source does better if taken in smaller chunks. It makes rewrites and bugfixes more localized, it lets users choose the best option for them (rather than using that mail client that's bundled and always in their face), it keeps resource usage low, and it lets developers release on a more timely schedule.
Re:Does Mozilla need to do this, or can we be snea (Score:5, Informative)
Threading (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Threading (Score:5, Informative)
Why DeCOM SVG ? (Score:4, Interesting)
How about decent fonts (Score:3, Interesting)
I run Mozilla 1.2.1, which came with Red Hat 9 and which works mostly ok, but of course is now old and buggy. I tried upgrading to 1.5 and then to 1.6, and they're newer and better, except their fonts look like crap. A little research indicates that unlike the 1.2.1 that I'm running, the default 1.5 and 1.6 builds don't have Xft enabled. I ended up rolling back to 1.2.1 just because the fonts look so much better. 1.2.1 as shipped from Redhat has font selections in the appearance menu called "System Default" which gives good looking fonts. The Mozilla builds don't have that choice. You have to pick from a bunch of specific fonts which all look bad.
Any idea why Xft and good fonts aren't enabled by default in Mozilla? What do I have to do to enable them in 1.5 or 1.6? I'd sure like to be able to quit using 1.2.1 but feel stuck with it until I find the time to make some big project of figuring out what's going on. Blecch.
Isn't a platform against their new philosophy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Building an entire platform would be in contradiction to that.
Contradicting the *nix philosophy is not such a bad thing, but where would be the utility in *nix platform.
The stuff they make already has speed and resource issues.
Assuming they could get over these, what is the need for such a platform and why?
Steve
Re:Isn't a platform against their new philosophy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Assuming they could get over these, what is the need for such a platform and why?
Network-delivered applications are the future. Every business loves them because they are easy to deploy. Open source teams love them (think Bugzilla, SourceForge, groups.google.com) for the same reason. Service providers (Google, HotMail, Expedia) love them too. It's a total love-fest. The only problem is that the user-interfaces suck rocks.
Microsoft is attacking this problem on a few fronts including .NET Winforms and Longhorm XAML. It makes no sense for the open source world to wait for Microsoft to establish a standard and then say: "we could do that too. Let's clone it!"
I am happy to see MOzilla be pro-active here. Let's make network-delivered applications as rich as installed applications (except where bandwidth makes that impossible).
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is Mozilla "finished"?
Have the startup speed problems been solved?
Is Mozilla as robust as they would like it to be?
Why not stamp out all of the performance issues before thinking of moving on?
Those issues are *THERE* .
If Dillo ever got finished you would see people dropping Mozilla like an Atkin's dieter dropping a hot potato.
Peformance still counts, even if you try bribing the end user with nice features.
Steve
Re:Suggested directions (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Suggested directions (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Suggested directions (Score:5, Funny)
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
And before you flame me, I'm a staunch Mozilla fan and this was posted using Firefox.
Is it the earth... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Suggested directions (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey, guess what? My signature, my slashdot username and password, and my likeness (i.e., picture),are also non-free and will never be checked into CVS. You can use the ideas in my Slashdot comments, but you can't sign them "orthogonal".
I may grant you a license to use my code -- or other ideas --, but I'm never going to grant you any license yo go around and sign my name to your work. And that's the whole issue here: the Firefox logo is not crucial to the compilation of Firefox code; nothing in the code reads any secret checksums steganographed into the logo.
But the logo is an essential imprimatur that declares a particular build to be an official build, with all that connotes -- such as a well founded belief that it represents the actual work of the official development team and is not likely to be a trojan exploit.
All that not having the logo in CVS deprives you of is bragging rights that aren't yours to claim.
Re:Suggested directions (Score:5, Funny)
"mozilla works perfectly, at least more perfectly than any other windows app... it does not install on my machine..."
And it actually made perfect sense.
Acrobat crashes FireFox. Memory leaks verified. (Score:5, Informative)
That's interesting. I've often thought that some bad Acrobat and FireFox interaction is causing problems.
FireFox 0.8 has memory leaks. Load enough instances and tabs, and it will always crash. (This has been verified [mozilla.org] under Linux and Windows XP.)
When FireFox crashes, it also crashes Windows XP SP1! Windows XP SP1 doesn't show an error message, but the OS becomes unstable, and it is necessary to reboot.
This is shocking to me. The explanation seems to be that the features of Windows XP that most users see run well, but a little below the surface, Windows XP is not a finished operating system. I think a fundamental definition of an operating system is that a real operating system can handle bad behavior of a program without self-destructing. So, after all these years of development, Windows is more a sociological phenomenon than an operating system. It amazes me that Microsoft managers are unable or unwilling to take care of business.
When FireFox crashes under Linux, Linux remains completely stable. (I suppose you could have guessed that.)
I have copies of all the browsers, and in my opinion FireFox is by far the best. Browsers are windows on the world for an increasing number of people, so it is important that the world has an excellent one.
I think FireFox's memory management issues should be fixed before any other work is done. Of course, that is for the FireFox/Mozilla team to decide.
(Posted using FireFox, of course.)
Re:Suggested directions (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, 1.3 was still kinda buggy and even 1.5 had a few remaining issues, but 1.6 is almost perfect for day to day use and firefox is so cool you could install it for your parents.
In my mind, mozilla.org is where you download the ultimate IE patch.
Re:Glad to see (Score:4, Insightful)
Why the heck isn't it included in the default build already?
SVG's gonna be killer when we can actually use it (and count on users being able to use it too)
Re:Glad to see (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What about KISS? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What about KISS? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I use Opera for one reason (Score:5, Informative)
I agree, Mozilla is a bit bloated. However, Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird are meant to tackle problems like that.
The design of Mozilla has been to make it easily embeddable so other developers can use its rendering technology and make their own interface and use a different widget set. Many projects already do, e.g. Galeon in GNOME and K-Meleon (using MFC) for Windows.
Re:I use Opera for one reason (Score:5, Informative)
See http://www.ocallahan.org/mozilla/why-no-native-wi
Re:I use Opera for one reason (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mozilla pulling an IE? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm using Safari 1.2 and I haven't had any problems. The page does look better in FireFox, but it certanly works with Safari.
Re:Sadly (Score:5, Funny)